Guy Rundle

THE passage of time is tough on cinema. Take Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, for example. That iconic opening scene - a group of early humans gathering round a sheer black rectangular monolith that had suddenly appeared among them, to the thunderous tones of Strauss' Thus Spake Zarathustra - dominated our consciousness from its 1968 appearance. What was the monolith? Was it God? Was it technology? The mystery could not be easily answered.

Watch it afresh today, and, sadly, the enigma is resolved. For the last decade or so, it has been impossible to watch the film without concluding that, in drawing their strength from that sheer black object, our ape ancestors are worshipping the first plasma screen. Towering above them, towering above us, is that single artifact that has come to dominate our lives, the screen. Archaeologists of the future will dig up copies of the film and conclude that this was our religion, our devotion to the monolith so all-consuming that we carried tiny devotional talismans of it around with us, objects we called ''iPhones''.

Amid all the billions of words and images devoted to the information revolution that has transformed our world over the past two decades, relatively little has been devoted to the single greatest change in our moment-by-moment existence: our sheer level of involvement with the screen. Once boxy pieces of furniture carrying a narrow stream of content, occupying part of the day, screens are now ever-present, at hand, omniconnected, the division between screen and non-screen life utterly elided.

No aspect of the communications revolution has been as far-reaching or as little debated as the occult power of the screen. Everyone knows this at some level - knows that checking emails can become a four-hour session watching YouTube - or hates the way their attention can be remorselessly drawn by a flickering image.

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Yet the screen has a dual effect, which makes its commanding power a slippery subject to get a hold of. Its effects are both physiological, relying on our involuntary attraction to bright moving images and sound, and existential, drawing in our desire for stories, fantasies, meaning, from HD films to YouTube cat videos.

Whatever the pleasures and enrichments of the suddenly ubiquitous ''private'' hand-held screen, there is also a questionable counter-effect - the private screen dissolves a shared sense of place and disengages the visual order from the other senses. What were once physical constraints on its role in our life - you can't slip a TV in your pocket - have now gone, and taming the pull of the ''black mirror'' of the smartphone becomes a cultural and individual challenge, one we are yet to fully make clear to ourselves.

Yet more insistent still than the challenge of the private screen is that of the ''public screen'' - the profusion of full vision, and often sound, that is coming to dominate our public spaces, from transport hubs to institutions such as hospitals and schools, and the quasi-public spaces such as malls. Advertisers are eager to replace static ads with screen-based ones for obvious reasons: it's easier to colonise our desires. Indeed, it's nearly impossible to resist the draw on our attention, and public bodies want to increase revenue by turning neutral space they control into a commodity, which can be sold.

In Britain, hospital wards have become dominated by a media system that features a message from the Tory Health Minister on a continuous loop, and can only be turned off by subscribing to the pay-per-view entertainment system; even then, any TV in the ward not so engaged will pump out the same message, tormenting sick and captive people. In Sydney, underground train stations have been dominated by projected ads with full sound. Even where there is no compelling commercial interest, screens are used as pacifier and air-filler, in waiting rooms and other public areas.

Faced with such imposition, many people shrug their shoulders and joke about 1984. But any ironic tone is unwarranted. The omnipresent public screen is a form of soft-core totalitarianism. Only the fact that it is run by corporate capital first and the state second obscures its closeness to that aspect of Orwell's dystopian vision.

The ease and cheapness with which such screens can now be installed means that we have to actively resist their spread and assert a fuller notion of what is ''public''. This is not only a matter of free physical space but of free cognitive space.

We have the right not to be constantly assailed by sound and vision that is deployed specifically because we cannot exclude it from our consciousness. Such public cognitive space is an essential condition of full freedom, and it should be actively asserted by regulation, at state and local government level, probably by progressive groups - right-wing libertarians are too dependent on commercial donors to have the courage to make it an issue. If a private shop wants to lay sound and vision on thick, that's their prerogative. But trains, hospitals and the like are places we have to use. Their cognitive space is attractive precisely because they deliver a captive audience, and the sale of such space is the theft of a public good.

Even at the most basic level, change can occur. The blaring TV in the waiting room was always an insult to anyone who didn't want to hear it, and had little justification. It has none at all now that ''private screens'' are so readily available. Turn them off, and give us the choice. Individually, we will be dealing with the cultural issues of the screen revolution for some time. But as a public issue there is no reason why we cannot immediately stop the process by which we are treated as if the world had not changed, and we were little more than apes, to be ruled over by the monolith.

Guy Rundle's e-book, And The Dream Lives On: Barack Obama, the 2012 election and the Great Republican WhiteOut, is available this week.

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